Month: April 2019

Matthew Drage is an artist, writer and postdoctoral researcher. He lately completed his PhD at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge, and is now Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in the History of Art, Science and Folk Practice, at the Warburg Institue, in the School of Advanced study, University of London. His first article from his PhD, Of mountains, lakes and essences: John Teasdale and the transmission of mindfulness, appeared in December 2018, as part of the HHS special issue, ‘Psychotherapy in Europe,’ edited by Sarah Marks. Here Matthew talks to Steven Stanley – Senior Lecturer in the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff University, and Director of the Leverhulme-funded project, Beyond Personal Wellbeing: Mapping the Social Production of Mindfulness in England and Wales – about the article, and his wider research agenda on mindfulness in Britain and America.  

Steven Stanley (SS): This article is your first publication based on your PhD research project, which you recently completed. Congratulations! Can you tell us a bit about your PhD project?

Matthew Drage (MD): Thank you! So yes, my PhD project was a combined historical and ethnographic project which focused on the emergence of “mindfulness” as a healthcare intervention in Britain and America since the 1970s. My main question was: why was mindfulness seen by its proponents as such an important thing to do? Why did they seek to promote it so actively and vigorously? I focused on a key centre for the propagation of mindfulness-based healthcare approaches in the West: the Center for Mindfulness in Health, Care and Society at the University of Massachuestts Medical Center. I also looked at the transmission of mindfulness from Massachusetts to Britain in the 1990s – this is an episode I narrate in the article.

I had a real sense, when I did my fieldwork, archival research and oral history interviews, that for people who practice and teach it as their main livelihood, mindfulness was something like what the early 20^th century sociologist Max Weber called a vocation. I had a strong impression that this devotion to mindfulness as a way of relieving suffering was what helped mindfulness to find so much traction in popular culture. While my PhD thesis doesn’t offer empirical support for this instinct, it does focus very closely on why mindfulness seemed so important to the people who propagated it. I argued that this was because mindfulness combined some of the most powerful features of religion – offering institutionalised answers to deep existential questions about the nature of human suffering and the purpose of life – while at the same time successfully distancing itself from religious practice, and building strong alliances with established biomedical institutions and discourses.

Maybe the real discovery – which is something I only mention briefly in this article – is that religious or quasi-religious ideas, practices and institutions, especially Buddhist retreat centres – were crucial for making this separation possible. Mindfulness relied heavily on Buddhist groups and institutions (or, at least, groups and institutions heavily influenced by Buddhism) for training, institutional support and legitimacy, whilst at the same deploying a complex array of strategies for distancing itself from anything seen as as potentially identifiable (to themselves and to outsiders) as religious.

More specifically, most mindfulness professionals I met sought to distance themselves from the rituals, images, and cosmological ideas associated with the Buddhist tradition (for example chanting, Buddha statues or the doctrine of rebirth). But at the same time, many “secular” mindfulness practitioners shared some fundamental views with contemporaneous Buddhist movements. Many held the view that the ultimate goal of teaching mindfulness in secular contexts was to help people to entirely transcend the suffering caused by human greed, hatred and delusion: that is, reach Nirvana, or Enlightenment, the central goal of Buddhist practice. And the sharing of these views between Buddhist practitioners and secular mindfulness teachers was helped by the fact that the latter frequently attended retreats with local Buddhist groups – indeed, often helped lead those groups! In my project I try to show how blurry the lines were, and that this blurriness was really at the heart of what the secular mindfulness project – at least in its early stages – was about: trying to keep the transcendental goal of Buddhism intact whilst shedding aspects of it that were seen as mere cultural accretions, deliberately blurring the boundaries between the religious and the secular. 

SS:How did this project come about?

MD: I came across secular mindfulness in 2011 through my own personal involvement with religious Buddhism. It was clearly on the rise, and while I wasn’t that interested in practising meditation in a secular context, I could see it was probably going to get big. Mindfulness seemed part of a more general cultural trend towards using science and technology to reshape the way the individual experiences and engages with the world around them. Technological developments like personal analytics for health (tracking your own fitness with wearable devices, say), and increasingly personalised user-experiences online, also seemed to exemplify. When I decided to do a PhD in 2013, I was interested in a very general way in questions of subjectivity and technology in contemporary Western culture, and I picked the one that seemed to fit best with my existing interests.

SS: Your article makes an important contribution to the historiography of recent developments in clinical psychology in Britain, especially the development of so-called ‘third-wave’ of psychotherapy (that is, approaches that include mindfulness and meditation). In particular you highlight the perhaps unexpected influence of alternative religious and spiritual ideas and practices on the emergence of British mindfulness in the form of Williams, Teasdale and Segal’s volume, Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy, in the 1990s. You have also unearthed some fascinating biographical details regarding living pioneers of British mindfulness. Did you know what you were looking for before doing your study? Were you surprised by what you found?

MD: The simple answer is sort of, and yes! I kind of found what I was looking for, and (yet) I was surprised by what I found. 

When I began my research I was convinced that mindfulness was just another form of Buddhism, slightly reshaped and repackaged to make it more palatable. My supervisor, the late historian of psychoanalysis Professor John Forrester, warned me about taking this approach. I remember him telling me, “If you keep pulling the Buddhism thread, the whole garment will unravel!” And unravel it did. After about three years, I realised that the most central metaphysical commitments of the mindfulness movement were not especially Buddhist, but owed as much, if not more, to Western esotericist traditions. By this I mean the 19^th century tradition that includes the spiritualist theologian Emmanuel Swedenborg, the American Transcendentalists (e.g. David Henry Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson) and, in the 20^th century, people like the countercultural novelist and philosopher Aldous Huxley. These thinkers shared, amongst other things, the idea that there is a perennial, universal truth at the heart of all the major religions. The influence of this view was often, I found, invisible to mindfulness practitioners themselves. Indeed, it was invisible to me for a long time. They, like me, had often encountered Buddhism through the lens of these very Western, esotericist religious or spiritual ideas, so they just appeared as if they’d come from the Buddhist tradition. So while I wasn’t surprised by the influence of spiritual ideas on mindfulness, I was surprised by their source.

I was also surprised by the conclusions I reached about its relationship with late 20^th century “neoliberal” capitalism. I’m not quite ready to go public with these conclusions yet, but watch this space. I’ll have a lot to say about it in the book I’m working on about the mindfulness movement.

SS: As you say in your article, mindfulness has become a very popular global phenomenon, which in simple terms is about being more aware of the present moment. When we think of mindfulness, we tend to think of ‘being here now’. What was it like studying mindfulness as a topic of historical scholarship? And, vice versa, mindfulness is sometimes understood as referring to, as you say, a ‘realm beyond historical time’. What lessons are there for historians from the world of mindfulness?

MD: A really great question. There is a fundamental conflict between my training as an historian and the views I was encountering amidst mindfulness practitioners. They tended to use history in very specific ways to legitimise their views. Mindfulness was taken as both about a universal human capacity (and thus beyond any specific historical or cultural contingency) and primordially ancient, a kind of composite of the extremely old and the timeless. If mindfulness had a history at all, so the story within the mindfulness movement tended to go, it was coextensive with the history of human consciousness. 

I spent a lot of time thinking and writing about the history of this view of the history of mindfulness. This was challenging because it often left me feeling as though I was being somehow disloyal to my interlocutors within the mindfulness movement; as though I was – in a way that was very hard to explain to them – undermining a key but implicit pretext for their work. In the end I tried to present a view of mindfulness which takes seriously its claims to universality by examining the historicity of those claims. I do not want to assume that there are no universals available to human knowledge; and if there are, then – as feminist science and technology studies scholar Donna Haraway argues in her incredible 1988 essay, “Situated Knowledges,” universals are always situated, emerging under very specific historical conditions. My main theoretical concern came to be understanding and describing the conditions for the emergence of universalising claims about humans.

To answer the other part of your question: I think mindfulness teaches historians that time is itself a movable feast; that we should take seriously the possibility of a history of alternative or non-standard ways of thinking about time. Mindfulness practitioners often talk a lot about remaining in the “present moment,” a practice which you could think of in this way: it takes the practitioner out of the usual orientation to time, to past and future, and creates quite a different sense of the way time passes. I found that institutionalised forms of mindfulness practice, to some extent, organised to support this change in one’s approach to time. I suspect this is also linked to an idea that I talk about in my article, the idea that mindfulness is somehow “perennial” or “universal.” There is a sense in which by practising mindfulness, and especially by practising on retreat, one is removing oneself from the usual run of historical time.  I think that it would be extremely interesting to think about how to do a history of this phenomenon; a history of the way people, especially within contemplative traditions, have sought to exit historical time.

SS: Many researchers of mindfulness also practice mindfulness themselves. Did you practice mindfulness as you were studying it? If you did, how did this work in relation to your fieldwork?

MD: Yes, I did. I was reluctant to do so initially, mainly because I had my own Buddhist meditation practice, and didn’t want to add another 40 minutes to my morning meditation routine. However, when I started meeting people in the mindfulness movement, they were very insistent that mindfulness could not really be understood without being experienced. While carrying out my PhD research I went to a lot of different teacher training retreats, workshops and events, and even taught an 8-week mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) course to students at Cambridge. I think that this was an indispensable part of my research, to experience first hand what people were talking about when they spoke about mindfulness. Participating in a shared sense of vocation that I encountered amongst many mindfulness professionals showed me just how emotionally compelling  mindfulness was.

SS: Mindfulness is often presented as a secular therapeutic technique which has a scientific evidence based – and that it has completely moved away from its religious roots. Does your work challenge this idea and if so, how? And, related to this, what do you mean in your article by the ‘Buddhistic milieu’?

MD: As I say above, I do mean to complicate this idea that mindfulness is a straight-up medical intervention, moving ever-further from its religious roots. I think perhaps the development of mindfulness as a mass-cultural phenomenon roughly follows this trajectory. But this trajectory is also in itself complex: the parts of the mindfulness movement that I studied were also an attempt at making society more sacred, using the secular biomedical discourse, institutionality and rationality as a means of doing so – although most people wouldn’t have talked about it in this way. Secular biomedicine, at least for the earliest proponents of mindfulness, was seen as a route through which a what we might think of (though they didn’t think of it like this) a special kind of spiritual force (a force which, in my view, has very much to do with what we normally call religion), could be transmitted.

I mean by the ‘Buddhistic milieu’ to refer to something fairly loose – the constellation of communities, institutions, texts and practices which are strongly influenced by the Buddhist tradition, but which do not – or do not always – self-identify as Buddhist. It’s a coinage inspired by sociologist of religion Colin Campbell’s idea of a “cultic milieu,” a term he used to describe the emergent New Age movement in the 1970s. For Campbell, the cultic milieu is a community of spiritual practitioners characterised by individualism, loose structure, low levels of demand on members, tolerance, inclusivity, transience, and ephemerality. When I talk about a Buddhistic milieu here, I mean something like this, but with Buddhism (very broadly construed) as a focus. Some traditions, such as the Insight meditation tradition, which did much to give rise to the secular mindfulness movement, especially encourage this type of relationship to Buddhist practice, emphasising their own secularity, and insisting on its openness to practitioners from any faith tradition.

SS: You suggest that the transmission of mindfulness follows a ‘patrilineal’ lineage which is captured by terms like dissemination, essence, seminal and birth. Your focus is very much on the male ‘founding fathers’ of Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) and Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) rather than the women pioneers of the movement. Given that such stories of male founders have been troubled by feminist and revisionist historians of science and psychology since the 1980s especially, can you tell us more about the gender politics of the mindfulness movement and give us a sense of the role female leaders have played in the movement?

MD: An excellent but difficult line of questioning! When I first wrote this paper – and when I started my PhD – I took a much more explicitly feminist perspective. But as I started to write, I was confronted by how incredibly sensitive a topic this is, and I’m still not quite ready to say anything very definite. Mindfulness was not, nor do I think we should expect it to have been, impervious to the tendency towards patriarchal domination that permeates society in general. And, as you suggest here, we might fruitfully read some of the key symbols of male power I identify in my article as a sign of this tendency. I can’t say much more for now by way of analysis, but I’m aiming to tackle this issue more directly in the book.

I can give a couple of cases, though, which I plan e to explore in more detail in the future. The first is the role of meditator and palliative care worker called Peggie Gillespie who worked with Jon Kabat-Zinn in the very earliest days of his Clinic in Worcester, Massachusetts (where he first developed Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction). Gillespie joined Kabat-Zinn as co-teacher in 1979, either in the very first mindfulness course he taught to patients at the University of Massachusetts Medical, or not long afterwards. She then acted as his second-in-command for the first couple of years of the Stress Reduction Clinic’s existence. She was certainly involved in developing MBSR (which was called SP&RP – the Stress Reduction and Relaxation Program, for the first decade of its life), and even wrote the first ever book about MBSR, her 1986 work Less Stress in Thirty Days. To my knowledge, however, Gillespie only gets a single mention in any writing anywhere about the history of MBSR – in the foreword to Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Full Catastrophe Living. The second example is the relative neglect of Christina Feldman. It wasn’t until the very end of my research period that I realised just how influential a figure Feldman has been – she had led the retreat on which Kabat-Zinn had his idea for MBSR, and went on to be the primary meditation teacher of one of the main early proponents of British mindfulness, cognitive psychologist John Teasdale. Although again she’s rarely mentioned, in a sense she oversaw the birth of secular mindfulness both in Britain and in America. I’m hoping that she’ll grant me an interview, so that I can write her into the book!

SS: If a teacher or practitioner of mindfulness is interested in your research, and wants to know more about the history of mindfulness, what texts would be in your History of Mindfulness 101?

So, when it comes to straightforward history, I’d go for Jeff Wilson’s (2014) Mindful America, Anne Harrington’s (2008) Cure Within, Mark Jackson’s (2013) The Age of Stress, and David McMahan’s (2018) The Making of Buddhist Modernism. These books all do important work in both narrating episodes the history of mindfulness since the 1970s, and in situating those episodes amidst broader currents in the history of science, medicine, and religion. Finally, Wakoh Shannon Hickey’s forthcoming book Mind Cure: How Meditation Became Medicine, was published a couple of weeks ago in March 2019. I haven’t read it yet, but I know something of her doctoral research into the history of MBSR, and suspect it will provide a much more in-depth and focused exploration than has yet been seen.

Matthew Drage is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in the History of Art, Science and Folk Practice, at the Warburg Institue, in the School of Advanced study, University of London.

Steven Stanley is Senior Lecturer atthe School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University.

This is the second part of a two-part interview, between Vanessa Rampton, Branco Weiss Fellow at the Chair of Practical Philosophy, ETH Zurich, and the anthropologist Tobias Rees, Director of the ‘Transformations of the Human Program’ at the Berggruen Institute in Los Angeles, and author of the new monograph, After Ethnos (Duke). The discussion took place following a workshop on Rees’s work at the Zurich Center for the History of Knowledge in 2017. You can read the first part of the interview here.

4. Uncertainty and/as Political Practice

Vanessa Rampton (VR): I want to continue our conversation by asking you about the implications of foregrounding uncertainty and the ‘radical openness’ you mentioned earlier for aspects of life that are explicitly normative. Take politics, for example. Have you thought about the political implications of embracing uncertainty, and what could be necessary to facilitate communication, or participation, or what it is you think is important?

Tobias Rees (TR): For me, the reconstitution of uncertainty or ignorance is principally a philosophical and poetic practice. These concepts are not reducible to the political. But they can assume the form of a radical politics of freedom.

VR: How so?

TR: For a long time, in my thinking, I observed the classical distinction between the political as the sphere of values and the intellectual as the sphere of reason. And as such I could find politics important, a matter of passion, but I also found it difficult to relate my interest in philosophical and anthropological questions to politics. And I still think the effort to subsume all Wissenschaft, all philosophy, all art under the political is vulgar and destructive. However, over the years, largely through conversations with the anthropologist, Miriam Ticktin, I have learned to distinguish between a concept of politics rooted in values and a concept of politics rooted in the primacy of the intellectual or the artistic. I think that today we often encounter a concept of politics that is all about values, inside and outside of the academy. People are ready to subject the intellectual –– the capacity to question one’s values –– to their beliefs and values.

VR: For example?

Tobias Rees: This is much more delicate than it may seem. If I point out the intellectual implausibility of a well held value … trouble is certain. Maybe the easiest way to point what I mean is to take society as an example again. We know well that the concepts (not the words) of society and the social emerged only in the aftermath of the French Revolution, under conditions of industrialization. We also know perfectly well that the emergence of the concepts of society and the social amounted to a radical reconfiguration of what politics is. I think there is broad agreement that society is not just a concept but a whole infrastructure on which our notions of justice and political participation are contingent. If I point out though that society is not an ontological truth but a mere concept – a concept indeed that is somewhat anachronistic in the world we live in, people become uncomfortable. Many have strong emotional reactions insofar as they are vetted to the social as the good, and as the only form politics takes. When I then insist, as I usually do, the conversation usually ends by my interlocutors telling me that this is not an intellectual but a political issue. That is, they exempt politics as a value domain from the intellectual. I thoroughly disagree with this differentiation.

In fact, I find this value-based concept of politics unfortunate and the readiness to subject the intellectual to values disastrous. Values are a matter of doxa, that is, of unexamined opinions, and as long as we stay on the level of doxa the constitution of a democratic public is impossible. Kant saw that clearly and made the still very useful suggestion that values are a private matter. In private you may hold whatever values you prefer, Kant roughly says, but a public can only be constituted through what is accessible to everyone in terms of critical reflection. He called this the public exercise of reason. So the question for me is how, in this moment, we might allow for a politics that is grounded in the intellectual, in reason even, rather than in values. The anti-intellectual concept of politics that dominates public and especially academic discussions is, I think, a sure recipe for disaster. Obviously this is linked, for me, to the production of uncertainty and to the question of grounding practice in uncertainty.

VR: I am very sympathetic to your desire to avoid confusing the tasks of, say, philosophy with political activism, but how does this go together with uncertainty and ignorance?

TR: Yes, it may seem that my work on the instability of knowledge or on uncertainty amounts to a critique of reason. But in fact the contrary is the case: for me, the reconstitution of ignorance, the transformation of certainty into uncertainty is an intellectual practice. Or better, an intellectual exercise. It is accomplished by way of research and reflection; it is accomplished by thinking about thinking. Another way of making this point is to say that uncertainty –– or the admission of ignorance –– is the outcome of rigorous research, it is the outcome of a practice committed, in principle, to searching for truth. If I am at my most provocative I say that uncertainty implies an open horizon –– it opens up the possibility that things could be different and this possibility of difference, of openness, is what I am after. So one big challenge that emerges from this is how can one reconcile the intellectual and the political, and I do think that’s possible. That would lead back to what I called epistemic activism.

VR:  How would that work in practice?

TR: My personal response unfolds along two lines. The first one amounts to a gesture to Michel Foucault: with Foucault one could describe my work as a refusal to be known or to be reducible to the known. Hence, my interest in that which escapes, which cannot be subsumed, etc. A second way of responding to your question, with equal gratitude to Foucault, is to say that the political is for me first of all a matter of ethics, that is, of conduct: how do you wish to live your life? And here I advocate the primacy of the intellectual –– katalepsis –– over values. Based on these two replies one can approach the political on a more programmatic scale: whenever someone speaks in the name of unexamined values or claims to speak in the name of truth and thereby closes the horizon and undermines the primacy of the intellectual, I can make myself heard and ask questions and express doubt. And when I say doubt I don’t mean a hermeneutics of suspicion. I also don’t mean social critique. I mean radical epistemic doubt that tries to reconstitute irreducible uncertainty.

VR: So this would involve calling out the truth-claims of other actors?

TR:  I am not fond of the term calling out. The phrase tends to hide the fact that what is at stake is not only to confront the truth claims someone is making, but also to avoid the very mistakes one problematizes: to speak in the name of truth. I am more interested in speaking in the name of doubt: not a doubt that would do away with the possibility of truth and that would leave us with the merely arbitrary, but a doubt that transforms the certain into the uncertain, while maintaining the possibility of truth as measure or as guiding horizon.

5.Uncertainty as Virtue

VR: Let’s talk about the normative implications of uncertainty beyond politics. I was interested in a review of your work by Nicolas Langlitz in which he accused you of wanting to radically cultivate uncertainty, and he had arguments for why this wouldn’t work. Actually this reminds me of a passage in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov where the Grand Inquisitor condemns Christ for having burdened humanity with free choice, and claims that actually human beings cannot cope with freedom, nor do they really desire it. Rather they prefer security or happiness: having food, clothes, a house and so on. And one question would be, how do we acknowledge uncertainty, acknowledge its importance, but not cultivate it in a way that could potentially be destructive?

TR: I have several different reactions at once. Here is reply one: I am deeply troubled by the idea of decoupling happiness from freedom. As I see it now, uncertainty is a condition of the possibility of freedom –– and of happiness. Why? Because the impossibility to know provides an irreducibly open horizon. This is one important reason for my interest in cultivating uncertainty.

My second reply amounts to a series of differentiations that seem to me necessary or at the very least helpful. For example, I think it makes sense to differentiate between the epistemic and the existential as two different genres. To make my point, let me go to the beginning of the preface to the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, where Kant says that human reason (for reasons that are not its fault) finds itself confronted with questions it cannot answer. I am thoroughly interested in this absence of foundational answers that Kant points out here. What answers does Kant have in mind? He doesn’t actually provide examples and most modern readers tend to conclude he meant the big existential questions of the twentieth century: why am I here? What is the meaning of life? Stuff like that. However, I think that is not at all what Kant had in mind. He simply shared an epistemological observation: whenever we try to provide true foundations for knowledge, we fail. In every situation –– whether in science or in everyday life –– we cannot help but rely on conceptual presuppositions we are not aware of. What is more, there are always too many presuppositions to possibly clear the ground. The consequence, pace Kant, is that knowledge is intrinsically unstable and fragile. I am interested in precisely this instability and fragility of knowledge. Of all knowledge. Let’s say for me this instability is the condition of the possibility of freedom.

Up until this point I simply have made an epistemological observation. Now Langlitz, whose work I admire, asks if my epistemic cultivation of uncertainty is productive in the face of, say, climate change deniers. To me, he implicitly confuses here the epistemic –– which remains oriented towards truth and is an intellectual practice –– with the doxa driven rejection of the epistemic and the intellectual that is characteristic of the climate change deniers. What you are asking about though is of a different quality, right? You are asking about a more existential uncertainty.

6.Uncertainty and Medicine

VR: My question is motivated by thinking about cases such as medicine. For example, does the epistemic uncertainty you are concerned with require special measures in the clinical encounter? After all, physicians’ perceived ability to cope with uncertainty has a well-documented placebo effect. So for example physician and writer Atul Gawande – I’m thinking of his books Complications (2002) and Better (2007) – writes about all the things modern medicine doesn’t know in addition to what it does know. But he emphasizes that this self-doubt cannot become paralyzing, that physicians must act, and that action is – in many cases – in patients’ interests. So this doesn’t contradict per se what you were saying before, but it does show how epistemic uncertainty is seen as something that has to be managed in this particular professional setting, and that a kind of simulacrum of certainty may also give patients hope in a difficult situation.

TR: I think that perhaps the best way to address the questions you are raising is a research project that attempts to catalogue the multiple kinds of uncertainties that flourish in a hospital. If I stress that there are different kinds of uncertainties then this is partly because I think that different kinds of uncertainties have different kinds of causes –– and partly because I think that there is no obvious link between the epistemic uncertainty I have been cultivating and the kinds of uncertainties that plague the doctor-patient relation in medicine.

VR: I am surprised to hear you say that, because I understood the relation between technical progress and the skill of living a life in intrinsically uncertain circumstances as a central feature of your work. In Plastic Reason, for example, you quote Max Weber who says: ‘What’s the meaning of science? It has no meaning because it cannot answer the only question of importance, how shall we live and what shall we do?’ And as you know Weber came to that idea via Tolstoy, who basically says: ‘the idea that experimental science must satisfy the spiritual demands of mankind is deeply flawed’. And Tolstoy goes on to say: ‘the defenders of science exclaim – but medical science! You’re forgetting the beneficent progress made by medicine, and bacteriological inoculations, and recent surgical operations’. And that’s exactly where Weber answers: ‘well, medicine is a technical art. And there is progress in a technical art. But medicine itself cannot address questions of life and how to live, and what life you want to live.’

TR: But why does Weber answer that way? You are surely right that he arrives at the question concerning life and science via Tolstoy. However, it also seems to me that he thoroughly disagrees with Tolstoy. In my reading, Tolstoy makes an existential or even spiritual point. He places the human on the side of existential and spiritual questions and calls this life –– and then criticizes science as irrelevant in the face of these questions. Weber’s observation is, I think, a radically different one. Tolstoy is right, he says, there are questions that science cannot answer. However, if you want to live a life of reason –– or of science –– then this absence of answers is precisely what you must endure. Or, perhaps, enjoy. In other words, Weber upholds science or reason vis-à-vis its enemies.

One can refine this reading of Weber. He answers that science is meaningless. And I think the reason for this is that, as he sees it, science isn’t concerned with meaning. Indeed, from a scientific perspective human life is entirely meaningless. However, Weber nowhere argues that science is irrelevant for the challenge of living a life. On the contrary, he lists a rather large series of tools that precisely help here –– from conceptual clarity to the experience of thinking, to technical criticism. His whole methodological work can be read as an ethical treatise for how to live a life as a Wissenschaftler. According to Weber, the Tolstoy argument requires a leap of faith that those of us concerned with reason –– and with human self-assertion in the face of metaphysical claims –– cannot take.

It is easy, of course, to claim that life is so much bigger than science. But then, upon inspection, there is no aspect of life that isn’t grounded in conceptual presuppositions –– and these presuppositions have little histories. That is, they didn’t always exist. They emerge, they re-organize entire domains of life, and then we take them for granted, as if they had always existed. Which they didn’t. This includes the concept of life, I hasten to add. Weber opts for the primacy of the intellectual as opposed to the primacy of the existential. And for Weber the only honest option is to accept the primacy of the intellectual. That may mean that some questions are never to be answered. But all answers he examined are little more than a harmony of illusions.

You see, I think that this is easily related back to my distinction between epistemic uncertainty and existential uncertainty. In Plastic Reason I quoted Weber not least because my fieldwork observations seemed to me a kind of empirical evidence that proves the dominant, anti-science reading of Weber wrong. If you are thinking that it is your brain that makes you human and if you are conducting experiments to figure out how a brain works, well, then you are at stake in your research. Science doesn’t occur outside of life. None of this is to say that the uncertainties that plague medicine aren’t real. But it is to say that I think it is worthwhile differentiating between kinds of uncertainty.

Tobias Rees is Reid Hoffman Professor of Humanities at the New School of Social Research in New York, Director of the Transformations of the Human Program at the Berggruen Institute in Los Angeles, and Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. His new book, After Ethnos is published by Duke in October 2018.

Vanessa Rampton is Branco Weiss Fellow at the Chair of Philosophy with Particular Emphasis on Practical Philosophy, ETH Zurich, and at the Institute for Health and Social Policy, McGill University. Her current research is on ideas of progress in contemporary medicine.

---